April 16, 2009     Reported By: A.J. Higgins

Times are tough. But many Mainers fear that uncontrolled state spending is making life a lot tougher than it needs to be.  For the second time in three years, supporters of a tax cap have managed to get their citizens intiiative on the ballot.  Lawmakers on the Taxation Committee held a hearing today on the initiated bill that some have dubbed "Son of TABOR" or TABOR II. The bill is modeled after the Taxpayer Bill of Rights that was rejected three years ago by just over fifty percent of the voters. 

April 16, 2009     Reported By: A.J. Higgins

Times are tough. But many Mainers fear that uncontrolled state spending is making life a lot tougher than it needs to be.  For the second time in three years, supporters of a tax cap have managed to get their citizens intiiative on the ballot.  Lawmakers on the Taxation Committee held a hearing today on the initiated bill that some have dubbed "Son of TABOR" or TABOR II. The bill is modeled after the Taxpayer Bill of Rights that was rejected three years ago by just over fifty percent of the voters. 

Lawmakers on the Legislature's Taxation Committee say there's no doubt that a new Taxpayer Bill of Rights -- or TABOR II as it is better known -- will be on the fall ballot. And that's just fine with Gary Foster, chairman of Maine Taxpayers United who says that he's been waiting for tax relief from the Legislature ever since the first TABOR bill was rejected by Maine voters three years ago.

"Here we are, nonetheless, three years later, no tax relief, no mechanism in place to control government expansion, and worse yet we're experiencing the consequences of years of unrestrained spending in an ailing economy."

Under Maine law,  the Legislature must either adopt TABOR II as presented or pass it on to the voters in November. Foster and others would prefer that the voters decide on the measure, which would give them final power to approve or reject tax increses.  TABOR II would also require voter approval for state spending to exceed the rate of inflation plus population growth. They would also decide whether local property taxes could grow faster than personal income.

The new law would also enhance the public's right-to-know according to Tarren Bragdon, Chief Exceutive Officer of the Maine Heritage Policy Center. "TABOR increases the voters' right-to-know by requiring that towns post their budgets online at least two weeks prior to a vote and that towns and counties already use their model chart of accounts to uniformally report spending.  One of the things that's very difficult for elected officials at the local level is to compare apples to apples -- how is one town doing compared with another town -- because there's not uniform categories of expenditures."

Although the Legislature has the option of crafting a competing measure to appear alongside the TABOR question on the ballot, Chris Hall of the Portland Regional Chamber of Commerce doubts that one will surface this year.

Hall who is supporting TABOR II says he hasn't heard from any potential backers of an alternative plan. "It would be interesting to go out to the voters with different visions, hopefully consistent visions, of where we want to take the state.  So I think that that's something that I think we're open to discussing.  But very honestly, the feedback I've received from a lot of the leadership in this building has been, 'No we're not going to do a competing measure.'  And we respect that.  And we're sure that you would respect our going to the voters with these issues if that's the case."

"So there are some folks who don't want the Maine voters, evidently, to have the right to set their school budgets," says Christopher St. John, of the Maine Economic Policy Center, who opposes TABOR II . He says Mainers have routinely been overiding local caps on education spending at town meetings. 

And he remains skeptical about the intentions of TABOR II supporters, who claim their law will not affect education spending. "They want to set an arbitrary cap and not let them invest.  And they say, 'Oh we don't intend to touch K through 12 at all."  But of course the state general fund cap is going to have a serious detriment on the ability of local districts to support the schools in the manner that they have wished."

"We have made such drastic cuts, I don't know how we go further," says State Sen. Joe Perry, a Democrat from Bangor.  Perry says new tax reform proposals and significant cuts to the state budget should serve as powerful evidence that the Legislature is serious about reining in spending. He expects that the son of TABOR will meet the same fate as its predecessor.